


Valentine

by jazzfic



Category: ER
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A time without consciousness is a time without anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Valentine

**Author's Note:**

> For the [rewriting history](http://fictorium.livejournal.com/30363.html) meme, prompt ER, Carter/Lucy, lucy doesn't die.

A time without consciousness is a time without anything.

It takes a long, long time for Lucy to push that thought away.

 

\--

 

It also hurts to smile, but that doesn't stop her trying, when Elizabeth, voice thick through the surgical mask, says her name.

Quiet, dogged, determined Lucy. Took pity on a stranger because she's more than her job title; more than the hours of study and whole years of her life that will give her something above and beyond a white coat and allowance to call herself doctor.

(That stranger was in the room while the party thudded on into the small hours. Her valentine, black-eyed and hunched and too quick for her to see.)

Elizabeth watches Lucy. On the bed, damp, blond hair, watches as her lips form round shapes: _thank you._

 

\--

 

Perhaps she visits Carter. Or perhaps he visits her. People get wheeled around to all places in this white morphine fog. Either way, they manage to lock eyes seven and a half days after the fourteenth of February. It should be a date that's just another on the calendar, but for Lucy everything seems to revolve around little pink hearts in a bowl, a card and a box where there was once a cake with very blue icing. People are careful in the way they don't mention some words. She wonders why. It seems silly and old.

Carter doesn't speak at all. But that doesn't matter because neither does Lucy, so they're twins, two halves of the same slowly mending wreck, in their white and wheeling dreams.

 

\--

 

Dr. Romano is both a snake and a saint. Nothing and nobody gets past him. He scolds her as she tries to sleep. _Miss Knight, the hours you're going to have to give me for all this laying about._ But there's no sarcastic twist to the telling off. He looks at Lucy for a long time, and then shouts at an ICU nurse because her rubber soles squeal too loudly on the chequered floor. She wants to tell him it's okay; sound is good. It means that her ears work and so too do her brain and heart and lungs. Miracle organs. It's so hard to be a med student. So much to remember. And all the while the body ticks along and fills itself without needing to be prompted.

She stood on his doorstep once; the very private home of this small and angry man. That night there was a chill that bit at the lobes of her ears and stung her nose. _Dr. Romano, I'm asking for your help._ His eyes like a snake, cold and small. And he did her asking, still, and he never once asked her why.

 

\--

 

In the summer of that year, she walks through the doors of County General one last time. She's transferring to Seattle, she's going to live with her cousin, become a surgeon. She doesn't want to go but the options here scare her too much to not make a move, and she's come to realise that there might be too much to carry in her heart if she stays in this soaring chill of a city. She's in love with a ghost.

( _God, Carter_ , she thinks. _Why couldn't you listen when I asked?_ )

It's only Lucy who's left. Because he dies two weeks before she signs the transfer papers. The valentine she didn't know she already had, half-smiling at a card with no name, in that noiseless, darkened room.


End file.
